We learn the most from our suffering and the changes and the challenges on these trips. You don't learn much if everything goes great. Or if you are not scared shitless by bears. You don't learn much on the groovy little trips you sign up with to see some nice scenery. You need to be challenged to see your character and soul. Some of your scarier and better parts.

     For me, the scariest places have always been when I have been by myself on long trips on the arctic sea ice. My learning grounds – the places where it's just me and the polar bears. The scariest, suffering spots. We learn by our confusion. That fear of dying – trying to let go of that fear. The terror that this is such a scary place.
-       Don Gardner, arctic explorer, mountaineer. Heron Dance interview, issue 26.

The magical journey is the journey where you leave hearth and home in search of a deeper awareness, a deeper understanding of what life is about. Your potential.

I’ve been on a couple in my life. The magical part has to do with the deep feeling that no matter what the cost, the risk, the sacrifice, this journey is one you need to go on, and that you will be somehow supported. And you know that on that journey you will feel really alive. There’s a faith element and an energy element.

Magical journeys lead you to places you couldn’t imagine when you set out. Most journeys end where you start from, but you are different when you return. Life is different. Magical journeys have to do with the discovery of something inside, in your inner world.

Magical journeys have a dream element. You can’t always tell the difference between your dream world and reality -- your dream world becomes much of the reality -- on a magical journey. There is a strange happiness in your heart.

Magical journeys -- the ones Joseph Campbell described as “following your bliss” -- seem to have a series of obstacles at the beginning -- tests and tribulations that push your limits, your resolve. They gouge and change you. If you persist through those, doors start opening. Things start falling into place in strange almost mystical ways. You feel you are supported. Life sometimes gets really funky.

 Magical journeys are about solitude, about stewing in your own juices, confronting your own demons. You need to stew in your own juices.

You leave on a magical journey because if you don’t, you know your life will be smaller. You’ll be turning your back on life in some important way. If you don’t, life will be more about limits, obligations and bills and doing what others want you to do (often to justify the compromises they’ve made in their own lives) -- the Wasteland -- and less about wonder and exploration. If you turn your back on your magical journey, life will be more about waiting for the end of the movie of life, and less about enjoying, reveling in, the experience of being truly alive in a wonderous world.

. . .

Is there a magical journey in your life beckoning? Are you avoiding it because you are scared?

Dear comerado! I confess I have urged
     you onward with me, and still urge you,
     without the least idea what is our destination,

Or whether we shall be victorious, or
     utterly quell'd and defeated.
          - Walt Whitman, Leaves Of Grass

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